in for a transfer to the Navy on the grounds
of having submarine experience. But he's right in one thing--experience
don't count for what it should in the army.

"Right here in our battery we got a lot of plough boys from Kansas that
have been sitting on a plough and looking at a horse's back all their
lives, and they got them handling the machinery on these here guns. And
me, who knows everything there is to know about machinery, they won't
let me even find out which end of the cannon you put the shell in and
which end it comes out of. All I do all day long is to prod around a
couple of fat-hipped hayburners. My God, I hate horses."

But regardless of these inconveniences those first American artillerymen
in our overseas forces applied themselves strenuously to their studies.
They were there primarily to learn. It became necessary for them at
first to make themselves forget a lot of things that they had previously
learned by artillery and adapt themselves to new methods and instruments
of war.

Did you ever hear of "Swansant, Kansas"? You probably won't find it on
any train schedule in the Sunflower State; in fact, it isn't a place at
all. It is the name of the light field cannon that France provided our
men for use against the German line.

"Swansant, Kansas" is phonetic spelling of the name as pronounced by
American gunners. The French got the same effect in pronunciation by
spelling the singular "soixante quinze," but a Yankee cannoneer trying
to pronounce it from that orthography was forced to call it a "quince,"
and that was something which it distinctly was not.

One way or the other it meant the "Seventy-fives"--the "Admirable
Seventy-five"--the seventy-five millimetre field pieces that stopped the
Germans' Paris drive at the Marne--the same that gave Little Willie a
headache at Verdun,--the inimitable, rapid firing, target hugging, hell
raising, shell spitting engine of destruction whose secret of recoil
remained a secret after almost twenty years and whose dependability was
a French proverb.

At Valdahon where American artillery became acquainted with the
Seventy-five, the khaki-clad gun crews called her "some cannon." At
seven o'clock every morning, the glass windows in my room at the post
would rattle with her opening barks, and from that minute on until noon
the Seventy-fives, battery upon battery of them, would snap and bark
away until their seemingly ceaseless fire becomes a volley of sharp
cracks